Vision and Geography

Vision has been a topic of much interest not only for geographers but also for philosophers, painters, photographers, filmmakers, art historians, and cultural theorists. Since vision is studied and understood differently by a variety of people, it should not be expected that its theoretical and material impacts could be experienced in a similar vein. Vision has long been a concern for ontology (the study of existence), epistemology (the theory of knowledge and its production), and methodology.

Modern Western society has held vision as the paramount sense called on to produce knowledge, suggesting that seeing means knowing. Geography has a long-standing relationship with visual culture and has often been called a visual discipline. The link between vision and order, classification, and description has heavily influenced geographic thought. Throughout the late 19th and part of the 20th centuries, geographers were expected to describe, understand, and represent the world through maps or words completely and objectively. Geographers relied heavily on their senses, predominantly vision, to draw empirical or experience-based conclusions. Today, vision continues to dominate contemporary geographic research. However, in the past few decades, much work has been done by geographers and others concerned with the visual to recognize that vision cannot be taken as given. Ways of seeing, imagining, and representing what is seen are now understood to be the effect of specific social and technological circumstances.

Geographers approach the spatiality of vision in exciting and innovative ways. Contemporary human geographers have explored social practices that construct visuality, examined images that give shape to geographical imaginations, and engaged with various technologies of vision that design ways of seeing. They examine and produce meaning through map making and geographic information systems imagery by reading landscapes as visual texts and by investigating representations of space in a variety of media, such as painting, photography, and film. In the past 30 years, geographers have become increasingly concerned with representations of space within the visual field. Denis Cosgrove greatly influenced the way geography approaches the visual. He engaged with cultural landscapes not as passive objects but as sites where power relations, gender roles, national identity, political ideologies, and other social processes are actively produced. His scholarship pursued a new line of inquiry and methodology within human geography. Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove, among others, began to apply iconography (a critical reading of imagery to explore cultural values) to interpret images as socially, historically, and spatially contingent texts. Images are now understood not simply as mimetic evidence of objective, stable, and complete realities [Page 3026]but as powerful tools that actively construct the geographic imagination.

Technology plays a critical role in producing new ways of seeing. Technological advances in image capture, such as photography and film, engineer space and reality in meaningful ways. For example, with the advancement of aerospace engineering, images of Earth were taken that captured our planet in its entirety, representing Earth as being within the control of humans and our technologies and thus playing a powerful role in furthering political imaginations and geocultural agendas.

To address questions related to the ontologically stable world images present, many geographers have drawn on poststructuralist thought. Poststructuralist theory advocates that what is understood as material reality is a pieced-together fiction that is fragmented, partial, and multiple. Theorists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan have been instrumental in conceptualizing vision, visuality, and the function of the gaze for the modern subject. Vision is understood as what the human eye is capable of seeing within the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Visuality is broadly understood as socially produced and perspectival. Visuality is a process that is historically, spatially, and technologically contingent. The concept of the gaze is integrally connected to vision and visuality. Michel Foucault's understanding of the relationship between the gaze and subjectivity has been highly influential in geography and the social sciences more broadly. Foucault argues that the modern subject internalizes the panoptic gaze and is under perpetual surveillance both by himself or herself and by others. This understanding of the gaze renders the modern subject as fully visible, trackable, and governable. The psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan's notion of the gaze is distinct from the act of looking—the eye and the gaze are split from one another. The gaze itself is the object of looking and does not belong to the subject but rather to the object, such as a painting or a film. Lacan's theorizations of the gaze were taken up by psychoanalytic film criticism in the 1970s. The so-called Lacanian film theory is the site of much theoretical confusion and is being rearticulated by many scholars advancing a more rigorous understanding of the Lacanian gaze.

...